Radeon 9600 Pro Review 

This thing is sweet, I still have one. I softmodded a 9550 to 9600.

Having been using a Radoen 7500 for the last week the performance in these benchmarks makes me jealous. The 9600 truely was a brilliant card, still is for retro uses.

Goddamit i was using this for a while after the FX5200.i was impressed with its performance,back in the day,Half_life 2 run at 1024*768 with high details,pretty playable,like Far Cry 1,NFS U2,MW.Carbon...With a 2100+ Athlon XP and 768 MB ram.Upgrading to GF6600(non-GT) is like having it after the FX 5200.I belive it was the golden era of PC gaming.

I remember going to my friend's house and playing Half Life 2 for the first time on a Radeon 9600. We used to joke about the real world looking almost as good as HL2...

9600Pro was a greatly positioned card. Not many could afford the 9700Pro, but everyone wanted to be playing DX9 titles which were being released. The 9600Pro offered great framerates at decent settings for a good price AND super DX9 support. Of course the *smart* buyer would have taken the 9500Pro with the L-shaped VRAM and modded it into the full 9700Pro! Or waited a few months and snapped up the 6600GT ;-)

I really love videos such that one! I was growing up at the time when these cards were on the market and I was crazy about performance and benchmarks. So this video brings a lot of memories. thanks :)

This brings back good memories. I had a Radeon 9550 that overclocked like a dream.

This video is amazing as everything you do on this channel. 😊

I bought one of these after watching this video, and it's a surprisingly good card. Great for early XP games.

The nice video! The same Radeon 9600 Pro as it was in my first PC! The same list of games which I had played 12 years ago! Thanks a lot for this, man!

Your video has really good timing. I was just looking for a ATI Radeon 9600 video only a week ago. This is the video card in my iMac G5. It makes Warcraft 3 and Star Trek Elite Force look very good.

I remember getting my mum drive me to the PC store after school and rushing to get the 9600 Pro the first day it came out and then rushing to make my Macca's job on time 😂 That was the slowest shift ever waiting to go home but oh man did Desert Combat run amazing on it compared to the GF2 MX400 it replaced that night 😁

I'm a massive 9700pro fan so I've just added a 9600xt to my small collection. Love these cards.

I had one of these in circa 2003-2004, and it was awesome!

That old amd catalyst looked so simple and nice, even if I do like the Radeon software nowadays.

The second GPU I ever had was in a sweet Pentium 4 HT system that my parents got me for christmas, a Radeon X600Pro 256MB, in PCI Express. From what I remember reading in forums and magazines, performance was basically the same as the 9600 Pro, and boy was I happy. I had been using a Riva TNT2 for the longest time, paired with a PIII-800, and the X600Pro/PIV HT was a dream setup. It ran HL2 like butter, even at 1280x1024.

Thanks Phil, Excellent Cards. I still have a 9550 and a 9600 All in Wonder

I have a "brand new" 9600 XT 256MB. Unfortunately it had the crappy Sacon FZ capacitors, and half of them had bulged by just lying in a drawer for 10 years. I replaced all of them with Panasonic and Nichicon caps before testing it yesterday, and it works! :) It looks like your card has better capacitors. The ones to avoid/replace often have the model number "FZ54I" or similar, and are usually 1500uF 6.3v or 1000uF 6.3v. They were common on both ATI- and Nvidia-cards back then. At badcaps they call them the worst caps ever produced ;)

Wow, I never knew about the shim on the 9800 Pro. As a young and budding computer enthusiast I replaced what I thought was the thermal paste on it after the fan started becoming louder and louder. This broke the card. I remember spending about 10 months saving up for it. It put a considerable dent in my confidence at the time. Good to know it wasn't really my fault! :)

oh the memories, i still have a working radeon 8500 in my collection

my god the memories with this card. It served me well way back in 2004 up until 2010.

Finally the legend.

Such an awesome card along with the 9600XT for low power rigs. I ended up getting a FireGL T2-128 off your previous video. As you stated mate - the FireGL T2 works great as a 9600 alternative in a Windows 98 machine.

Back to my favourite era - nice!

This card was on my p4 from 2004 until 2011 until P4 chipset of my 3.0ghz Northwood has died, so this was MUCH better card than radeon 9700 pro and 9800 pro which were actually real hell of cards, ATI in that time made insanely huge mistake putting so small fan on 9700/9800 series - I replaced like 3 radeon 9800pro (even I had XT one which was worse) in one year because they all died due to over heating and yes I didn't overclock them or anything in this fashion. Cheers from Croatia.

Just got another retro laptop - Acer Ferrari 3400 with ATI 9700 mobility, that is actually a copy of desktop 9600pro. Now benchmarking and comparing with desktop card. Thanks for the video.

The 9600 came in both 128 MB and 256 MB variants. I can confirm that the 256 MB cards use a lower memory clock (400 MHz effective for the 256 MB model and 600 MHz effective for the 128 MB model) and you get about a 14% performance hit with the 256 MB model and its lower memory frequency in 3DMark 2003 (~3000 3DMarks vs 3500 3DMarks with my setup, described below). The 9600 Pro is still a great choice, and is very compatible with older MS-DOS games and classic Windows 98/early Windows XP games running with ATI Catalyst 6.2. Stability is greatly improved for MS-DOS games (within Win 98SE) if you install the "Unofficial Service Pack." I built two retro PCs using a using a Socket 775 platform (ASRock 775i65G, revisions 2.1 and 3.0), Pentium 4 520/2.8 GHz CPUs with 1 GB of RAM. Both run Win98SE and Windows XP beautifully with Radeon 9600s.

I had a 9600pro 64mb in my first ever gaming build. It had a Pentium 4B 2.8ghz OC at 3.2ghz and 1GB of RAM. At the time people said 512MB of RAM was enough but I wanted to have extra. I upgraded it with a 9800pro 128mb as soon as I could afford to before selling it a couple of years later and building an Athlon 64 PC.

Asus ENGTX 285 was the first large PCIE card I ever got new. Before that I was a budget buyer. Will have to make use of that electromyne discount and set it up again in a 64bit build.

love this card. had 2 of em

Thermal grease is also sort of glue to keep the heatsink in place, also use in a chipset heatsinks.

Found a low profile version of the 9600 Pro 256mb....Never knew they made such a thing

Awesome review of an awesome card.

I think a comparison of the Pro against the XT would be interesting. It would be interesting to see how the R360 of the XT compares to the R350 of the Pro.

Phil just bought one of these (9800pro) to pair up with my socket 754 3700+ on my ASUS K8V SE Deluxe motherboard, cant wait till it arrives

For some models of the ati 9600 pro i.e. OEM versions of the 9600 pro, they actually came with the yellow thermal pad.

You sir may have just solved one of my problems. My ati 9700 pro maybe dead and I didn't know it. Thanks I'll look into it a bit more.

OMG the 9600 Pro was the first ever AGP card I owned and only the 2nd GPU I had ever brought myself as my first was Radeon 9250 PCI

you deserve 500k subs

Very cool video, thanks! The tip about the metal shim is really useful, I have a couple video cards from that series, that's an excellent tip. Also a question - what aftermarket coolers for Radeon 9800/9600 Pro would you recommend that are available today, from eBay, for example? 🙂

Had same card, served me well for several years, on xp2600+ later i upgrade to 7600GS then i finally made jump to PCIE

i had one of these for years, the one with the heat pipe from sapphire, then I upgraded to a HD4650 1GB and WOW did that card ever blow my mind

It's fantastic because without shadow 10+ fps. It adds the wing for playable gaming with budget build pc!

I remember that issue with the shim with my 9700 Pro, just popped it away with a knife and some nail polish remover got that dried TIM away.

the last ati dos-compatible videocard is the 9200, from 9600 upwards the cards have some errors under dos.

I had a 9600XT back then! The first card I can play Act of War Direct Action with! The GeForce MX 440 I had didn't had the required shader level so it couldn't run it.

Had one of these in the first PC I ever built, with an AMD Athlon XP 3200+, Gigabyte GA7VAXP and Videologic Sonicfury soundcard.

My first ever pc had one, idk if it was a 9600 or 9600 pro, but it did die on me... Brings back memories, tho!

I have the exact same card in my collection :). Also a 9800 pro 128mb (agp 4/8x), and a 9800 pro 256mb.

I bought it NEW when it came out. It was expensive at its time, but was INCREDIBLE!

Black Radeon PCB looks so good.

Thanks for the video! I have several retro gaming builds, one has Voodoo 5, other has Radeon HD 4850 and I'm choosing between Radeon 9600 Pro and Radeon 9800 Pro. Which one would you recommend to install in my third build? My 9800 is already modified, has Zalman fan on it, but it's still too loud with its 1600 RPM, even with Noctua low-noise adapter I've had laying around.

Bought one of these in 2003 to play Half Life 2. This was the very first video card I bought with my own money at 15 years old. Had it paired with an Athlon XP 2400+.

Vert good review I gave away a lot of these cards friends loves it..

This is my xp machine: Semprom 3000+ socket 754 K8v-X SE with k8t800 chipset 2GB DDR1 800 HD 3650 512MB AGP All mainstream but very balanced.

Ah the 9600 Pro, it was during this age that people were hunting for the 9500 Pro and the 9800 SE with the L shaped memory modules. As you could unlock a 9800 or if lucky, 9800 Pro out of them.

Very cool you got the code names right

That's the one thing you always have to do lots of research and that way you know your parts just recently I acquired a Radeon x1800 GTO from what I understand my card is a mid-range product sometimes power and requirements for older cards are too much for the system the card I acquired seems to be running pretty okay given that I only have a 300 watt power supply but that's enough but I had to do a whole lot of research and a whole lot of searching so it really does pay to do your research especially when you're building a retro XP box

Can you review the ati Radeon hd 3440/3450? It would be much appreciated!

The yellow gunk they used as thermal pad didn't harden out when aging, it was a hard pile of junk when the card was new. It was wuite a hassle when I replaced the cooler of my 9500Pro (128-Bit) back in the days.

Phil, what would you recommend for retro build? Radeon 9600 Pro or GeForce FX 6200? I know that this is completely different league but with 9600 I have new opportunities with Win XP. However my target was 98 with good compatibility for DOS games (nGlide etc) and Win 98 era games + some extras like Max Payne. Would Radeon make a hit on compat. with nGlide and older GL games?

This is what I've got for my shuttle mini pc running windows 98. I picked the card for 5 euros, overclocked it to core 492 MHz and VRAM 700 MHz. The overclocked 9600 pro is insanely powerful, meanwhile handled well by a 200 W PSU

Nice Card. I never had one back in the days, I owned a 9700 Pro. But I really like the 9600 because its a very low power consuming card. I think I owned a P4 laptop with a 9600 mobile, this was called a gaming machine ^^

just bought a dell dimension 4550 this is perfect for it I kinda have gone crazy upgrading that old thing as it is meant as a tear down computer for my A+ class lol

love your videos! where do get these gpu coolers?. Thx!

Hi Phil, I'm wondering what was your test platform here for this card. Thanks.

By chance PhilsComputerLab have you looked into the SiS video cards for AGP? The 305 was around a TNT2 M64/Vanta and 315 which was quite a value (Overclocked it gave GeForce MX400 like proformance).

Remember that some manufacturers also selled cards with 200 MHz (400 DDR) memory. I got one of these from PowerColor. It runs quite fine with Catalyst 6.3, The latest official driver for the card is 6.2, but the next one can be installed over it and actually improves performance under Windows 98 SE quite a bit. Noticed the lack of features for really really old games tough, but nothing a Geforce 3 can't solve. What setting in Doom 3 too chose with a 320 MiB card like the 8800 GTS or a 384 MiB card like a 8800 GS or 9600 GSO? nVidia had some odd numbers with odd memory bandwith even back then (like the 448 bit bus on a GTX 260 and 192 bit on some other cards)

I have one of these amongst a few other Radeon cards from the era. I never really gave them a chance until recently. I was using them as "fillers" while I waited to obtain funds for Nvidia cards, but you know what? Many of these are really good? I have a 9600 in a P4 XP rig and a 7200 in a PIII rig and they perform really well. That said I have decided to keep them in these machines and save my money ;)

I still had the non-Pro version of this card until recently. In fact, it's still in use. I built a computer for my ex-gf's daughter and used this card in it.

hey Phil, im looking for a good upgrade to my FX 5200. Its a Windows 98 machine im looking to play DOS games but also early 2000's games, any suggestions?

I don't know if you're respond or not, but I bought a Radeon 9600 pro just today. You said it's 128MB GDDR on yours, but the one I bought says it's 256MB GDDR2. Do they make the model I bought or did I get ripped off?

nostalgia

I would really love to see a series of videos like you did about the best sound card for win 98... There would be any reason to get a 9600pro instead of a 9700pro or a Radeon x800? I'm considering getting a 6800GS and a 9700pro, what would be a nice CPU to pair with those GPUs?

Great video again as usual. On the subject of Your driving skills Phil, are You aware that if You could get hold of a used Logitech G25 they will work on everything from Windows 98se and up.

That heatsink looks crazy, where did you get that?!

Remembering working as an aprentice in pc part shop and spenind my wage on this beauty

I remember Doom 3 running this well. I had a pentium 4 1.6ghz with the 9600 Pro and ran Doom 3 so well. I also had a 12" Macbook Pro (that thing was the tits) with I believe a Geforce 5200Go and it ran Doom 3 in OS X very well.

What a blast from the past. Nice game selection, it really brought back many memories, although back then I didn't care for the frame rate. Also, I miss the old low TDP cards, that could actually do some proper gaming. Nowadays we have 150-180W TDP cards, that barely keep up with the game devs and their HW demands.

How good is DOS compatibility? Can you still play games like Doom, Jazz and Keen on this card? Currently building a retro dos machine. Bx440, Celeron 1,3, 512 mb, Win98 voodoo 2 sli I’m still looking around what a good main videocard could be. This could be an option or a Geforce 2 gts.

I have the same Video card. But the image output is a bit broken. It just gives a blurred image wit missing fragments. Should i try to reball the GPU? Any suggestions?

I was wondering if you could make a video about different AGP types, as I was thinking of upgrading my motherboard to one that has AGP 8X to get some extra performance out of my X1600 Pro.

Does it work with nGlide? What about DOS games?

Ah yes, the Radeon 9600 Pro, it was the first GPU I bought myself. I read a review where they tested a 9700 Pro and 9500 Pro, and I thought "Hmm, well, 9600 Pro must fit in between those". Unfortunatly it didn't, the 9500 Pro was actualy faster than the 9600 Pro. Still, it was a good card if you could get the drivers working (the driver on the CD didn't work lol, and with a 56K dial-in modem a new driver was too large to download). The Radeons back then performed a lot better than the GeForce FX series (especialy the 9700 Pro was a monster). I've had the 9600 Pro for years untill it went up in flames...litterly, some component failed when shutting down Windows (so not during a game, but during shutting down...) and burned a big hole in the card. A shame, because they were still nice for retro PC's, and now I have to do with less powerfull cards (like an GF FX5600 or GF4 Ti4400).

I bought the Radeon 9600XT (R96A) recently at a thrift store for $4.99 + tax. Could use some cleaning, but, nothing majorly broken (all of the caps are in place; 2 are bulged, but, not leaking, and no scraped traces). Edit: I installed the card in my Windows 98SE and everything went south. The monitor reports out of range and Windows 98SE doesn't boot or it reboots.

i have radeon9600 pro saphfire edition is that good now this is colleting dust on my desk

This was my first GPU , but it wasn't the pro version , it was the original , but it worked fairly well in the games I was playing. Even crysis managed to boot.

I can not get the drivers to work. Everytime I install it the computer resets when I try to boot into Windows 2000. Win 2K loads then the computer makes a shutdown sound and reboots.

9600 was pure power. I was playing games that seem impossible to run on this gpu, like Car Mechanic Simulator 2015. I didn't have rust effects though and was getting around 40 fps, had Minecraft 1.7.4 running at max (except render distance, which was kept at 4-8) with very playable fps of 70-100. I bet you could have played EVE Online, if it was 2006 outside. And it had great OC potential, at least for me. I had Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro Advantage 128 mb. And I still have it, it's fine and dandy, works without any troubles after me, using it excessively in harsh conditions. And it was so much better than nVidia alternatives! That is the time when AMD (ATI) had incredibly powerful GPUs compared to nVidia. I also still have FX5200, it's so much worse. Even though their stats are almost identical. It still can run minecraft, though. Slower, but it can.

Hi i have a problem in doom3 on my PC, P4 2,6 GHz HT ,1GB ram 400mhz single chanell , Raden hd 3850 AGP , 640*480 procesor with 100% usage and GPU only 6% and ~ 27 FPS . What's wrong ?

Would be nice to know the rest of the system specs and compare some other video cards of the period as the numbers are meaningless without knowing the rest of the system. Not too many people know how fast an obscure fireGL card performs as a point of reference.

Dang, even the first San Andreas has better physics than cyberpunk..

Great video! But what CPU did you use for these tests?

What can you say about the ATI VisionTek 9800xt AGP card for the game MS FS2004 on WinXP ??

Just bought a Radeon 9600XT since my Radeon 9200 couldnt play a lot of 2003 ish games I threw at it so hopefully this one will be able to play those games only cost $20

I bought 2 of these online from sapphire and built a couple systems with amd cpu's. They worked for like 5 years very well. edit: back in 2004-5

Philscomputerlab: i own a gravis ultrasound PNP just like you, i installed the 1 floppy disc driver, it installed all good, but i cannot make games work with sound, and when i choose gravis on doom setup... there is no music. Can you please advice on how you were able to install gus PNP and what files exactly (provide full name of files) did you use and how did you run the games? Gus is very difficult to to install its not very user friendly like other cards

@PhilsComputerLab in which resolution and Settings did you play GTA San Andreas with the 9600 Pro on this video? Its Interesting to compare because on my Pentium 4 3,6GHZ 1 GB DDR Ram it lags so much in some places if I set FX Quality from Low to medium if 3x Anti Aliasing activated. in 1280x1024 Resolution . Even with Radeon X 800 it lags in some places the same like the 6600Gt and IU have tested it on better PC too in Core 2 Duo E5400 with 9800T. This game runs of course better with this card but the same frame drops on the same places here... Why? What is the reason why this game runs so slow? Even if I set off Anti Aliasing and fx Quality the frame rate is 50 fps but not 60 or more and in lower resolution almost the same... Maybe its about Windows XP`? Maybe with Windows 2000 it would be run better?

great card especially with Windows 98 games

At 6:54 , you mean the equivalent of a Radeon 9600, right? I clearly remember that T2 is DX9 compatible while Radeon 9000 has zero DX9 support.